Bible or Qur’an

This article in IHT provides some encouraging news about the open debates taking place in Mecca during Hajj: The two-hour presentation "Mecca: The Cultural Capital of Islam" was dry, but things got rolling in the question and answer session in a way quintessentially Meccan. One by one, audience members – a surprising number of them women – came to the microphone with questions that few others would dare ask publicly. .ism," asked one woman. . "Why do we look only into the past and not to the future," another woman demanded. . The session soon grew into a raucous series…

slacktivist: Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated. As a white male Baptist, it is my duty today to denounce the violence perpetrated by Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, who yesterday attacked the police headquarters in McKinney, Texas, in a heavily armed but ineffectual assault involving a high-powered rifle, road flares, “gasoline and ammonium nitrate fertilizer.” I understand that this denunciation must be swift and unambiguous and that, in the absence of such denunciations made by and on behalf of every and all white male Baptists,…